Currently at the KITP

Right now I’m in the midst of a program I helped to organize (and I’m still organizing) at the KITP. The program deals with the question of how to use numerical methods from lattice and gravity to make inroads into interesting (usually very hard) questions about quantum field theory (and quantum gravity) and the dynamics [...]

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Novel Numerical Methods for Strongly Coupled Quantum Field Theory and Quantum Gravity

Here is an announcement of a program I will be organizing at the KITP from Jan 17 thru March 9 2012. It is a program on numerical methods for gravity and QFT. The web page of the program is located here. Here is the image I made to illustrate the program: it is generated by [...]

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Quantum tunneling

This week I have been explaining quantum tunneling in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory for my class. It is a fun subject and when I was educated in it a few details were left out. Happily nowadays its easier to find that information. I’m particularly happy with the description of this set of phenomena [...]

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Comments on “Exactly Marginal Deformations and Global Symmetries”

Last time I pointed to the paper by Green, Komargodski, Seiberg, Tachikawa and Wecht (GKSTW) I was asked to show what I would have done differently. Here is a sketch of some things that I would have put as a part of the main paper (this is not to be assumed to be comprehensive, or [...]

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Must read papers of the week

The Gravity Research Foundation announced the results of the 2010 competition. Here are the results. At UCSB we discussed the prize-winning paper by Mark van Raamsdonk today. It was a very lively discussion and we thought it was a great paper to read. Mark’s paper provided some very tantalyzing evidence that entanglement seems to play [...]

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The quest for Quantum Ideal liquids

Clifford Johnson pointed to me his post on the quest for perfect quantum fluids. In a certain sense, we are used to thinking about fluids as low energy phenomena (relatively low temperature physics). Famous fluids are characterized by fun properties like superfluidity, or ferrofluids that can be a lot fund to play with in an [...]

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The size of a donut hole

At some point I promised that I was going to write about my  most recent paper. So here is my promotion. In a sense, that paper is an exercise to understand what does it mean to have quantum gravity in a setup of emergent geometry: this is a situation where geometry is not there a [...]

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Yet another workshop announcement….

I’m organizing a workshop in late September, together with Jun Nishimura and Toby Wiseman, taking place in London. We’re very close to the limit of participants that we can afford. The workshop will be on Numerical approaches to AdS/CFT, large N and (quantum) gravity. We’re going to put a lot of people who have not [...]

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Happy Birthday, Tom and Willy

The last few days I attended the conference in honor of Tom Banks and Willy Fischler on the occasion of their 60th Birthday. Here are the details of the conference.

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Belief and facts in theoretical physics

Today on the arxiv Oswaldo Zapata wrote an essay on issues about fact and belief systems in superstring theory. Naturally, Peter Woit decided that this was really important and wrote a whole article about it. Here I will collect a few recollections that serve as a rebuttal/complement to some of those discussions. Mostly, I feel [...]

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